A checklist for stacking up IaaS providers

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the fastest growing segment of the cloud services market. According to Gigaom Research, the current worldwide cloud market is growing by 126.5 percent year over year, driven by 119 percent growth in SaaS and 122 percent growth in IaaS.

Irrespective of the workload type, the key building blocks of infrastructure are compute, storage, networking, and database. This report focuses on identifying a set of common features for each of the building blocks and comparing them with the equivalent services offered by key players of the IaaS industry. The scope of this report is limited to public clouds and it doesn’t compare private cloud providers offering IaaS.

This report doesn’t attempt to compare the price and performance of the cloud service providers. The IaaS players are dropping their prices so frequently that the captured snapshot would be obsolete by the time this report is published. Since each workload, use case, and scenario differs from customer to customer, providing the technical benchmarking information is not practical. It’s best to pilot your app on several clouds and see what actual performance you get.